Bluetooth Low Energy: Big Progress for Small Consumption!

In 2013 Bluetooth Low Energy, BLE, was difficult to work with. APIs were rare and buggy. Hackable shields were hard to find. Smartphones didn’t support it if they weren’t made by Apple, and even then it was limited. What a difference a year makes. Now in 2014 you can easily add BLE support to any Arduino, Raspberry PI, or other embedded system. Every major smartphone OS supports BLE and the APIs are finally stable. There are even special versions of Arduino built entirely around wiring sensors together with BLE. This session will introduce Bluetooth Low Energy, explain where it fits in the spectrum of wireless technologies, then dive into the many options today’s hackers have to add BLE to their own projects. Finally, we will assemble a simple smart watch on stage with open source components.